Raúl Asencio Allegations: What He Is Actually Accused Of
Updated: Sep 3
This piece deals with a live criminal case involving allegations of privacy violations and child sexual abuse material. It does not name the minor involved, and none of the individuals discussed here have been convicted of the specific allegations described unless stated otherwise. The presumption of innocence applies throughout.
As Raúl Asencio joined the senior team defense in a crisis situation in November 2024, for some time he became one of the most hopeful success stories of Real Madrid's youth academy.
Currently, he finds himself in a court room in Gran Canaria rather than in a locker room, and these two stories concerning the football player have almost nothing in common besides the same 23-year old person being involved.
That collision is the subject of this piece. Not whether Asencio is guilty of anything. That is for a Spanish court to decide, and as of publication, it hasn't.
What the Raúl Asencio Allegations Are Actually About
The allegations trace back to mid-June 2023, at a beach club in Amadores, on Gran Canaria's south coast. According to the prosecution's own account, three then-Real Madrid youth players Ferrán Ruiz, Juan Rodríguez and Andrés García had a sexual encounter with two young women that both the defence and the prosecution describe as consensual. One of the women was 18. The other was 16.
The alleged crime isn't the encounter. It's what came after it. Prosecutors say the three players recorded video and photos without the women's permission, then sent them to other people over WhatsApp despite being asked to delete them.
One of those videos reportedly reached Asencio's phone through a third party. He is accused of watching it and showing it to someone else.
This is important regarding the nature of the charges. The case against Ruiz, Rodríguez and García involves the more serious charge: production and distribution of child sexual abuse material, since, according to Spanish law, a “minor” for the purposes of the crime is any person under the age of 18, as opposed to the age of sexual consent in Spain, which is 16. This is not the charge against Asencio.
The Spanish prosecution is seeking two and a half years on him on two counts of "revelación de secretos", which is a privacy crime for having viewed and shared the video. Some English-language press reports about the case have failed to draw this distinction, describing Asencio as being charged along with the other three.
The more precise Spanish court reporting doesn't support that his charge is narrower, and it's worth being exact about it, because the gap between "recorded and distributed a minor" and "was shown a video by someone else" is not a small one.
What's established, what's alleged, what's still open
What's confirmed: the four were arrested in September 2023 and their phones seized. A Gran Canaria court formally indicted all four; Asencio's appeal to have the case against him dismissed was rejected in February 2025.
Though both women withdrew their individual charges of assault against Asencio following an apology and an unspecified sum of money on his part, such a gesture under Spanish law is able only to forgive the semi-public accusation of infringement on privacy, not the public one involving child pornography charged jointly with the three co-defendants, whose cases proceed independent of what any individual victim may want.
The trial started on 3 September 2026, spanning three days, with no verdict reached at time of writing.
The accused, not the convicted: it is alleged that Asencio willingly saw and shared footage he knew was recorded without permission. This is disputed by Asencio.
In a May 2025 statement, he claimed that he was simply viewing brief footage provided to him by another person, and that the case against him was still provisional and not established.
What remains uncertain: if the court will deem the forgiveness from the two women sufficient to end the case against Asencio, as well as what the outcome will entail. No official response regarding the matter has yet been given by Real Madrid.
A career that stalled mid-sentence
Asencio is from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, joined Real Madrid's academy at 14, and broke into the first team almost by accident Carlo Ancelotti turned to him in November 2024 after injuries wiped out most of the club's senior centre-backs. He looked composed enough to stay.
He made over twenty appearances that season, including in the Champions League, and was talked about as one of the more exciting defensive prospects to come out of the academy in years.
The version of Asencio in the 2026-27 season is different. He's been out with a hamstring injury, missed the start of José Mourinho's first campaign, and reporting suggests the club spent the summer trying, unsuccessfully, to move him on.
He was separately convicted of drink-driving on 2 September 2026 a fine and an eight-month licence suspension, after testing at nearly four times the legal limit in a case entirely unrelated to the video allegations, but arriving one day before the more serious trial began.
None of that is proof of anything in the Gran Canaria case. It is, at minimum, evidence that his public standing has been shaped by more than a court date.
Football has been here before but not always the same way
Football's history with allegations involving minors is not one story. It's several, and they don't belong in the same sentence.
Adam Johnson is the clearest case of a conviction. The former Sunderland and England winger was found guilty in 2016 of grooming and sexual activity with a 15-year-old fan, after exchanging hundreds of messages with a girl who had waited outside matches hoping to meet him.
He was sentenced to six years. There's no ambiguity in that outcome: a jury heard the evidence and convicted him.
Franck Ribéry and Karim Benzema sit in a different category entirely: charged, tried, and acquitted. Both were investigated over payments to Zahia Dehar, who was under 18 France's general age of consent was 15, but paying for sex with anyone under 18 is a separate offence during encounters in 2008 and 2009.
Both said they didn't know her real age. In January 2014, after roughly four years of proceedings, a Paris court dropped the case.
Gylfi Sigurðsson never reached trial at all. The Icelandic midfielder was arrested in 2021 on suspicion of sexual offences against a minor, released on bail, and left without a club for nearly two years while Greater Manchester Police investigated. In 2023, prosecutors closed the case with no charges filed.
Three different outcomes: conviction, acquittal after trial, no charges brought from three cases that all got compressed into the same headline shorthand at the time: "footballer," "minor," "investigation." That compression is exactly the problem.
Why this keeps happening
Youth fandom gives footballers a specific kind of access that most famous adults don't have: young fans who already trust them, follow them, and want their attention.
Combine that with money, platform and a culture that has historically closed ranks around star players, and you get precisely the conditions that sport-safeguarding researchers describe as producing risk not because footballers are unusually predatory as a group, but because access plus power plus admiration is a pattern abuse exploits in almost any setting, sport included.
Social media then does something specific to how the public processes all of this: it collapses "arrested," "investigated," "charged" and "convicted" into one undifferentiated signal of guilt, often within hours of a name trending. A courtroom moves in stages precisely because those stages mean different things. A timeline doesn't.
Clubs complicate this further. A club's incentive, in the moment a star player is accused of something, is rarely to get out ahead of the facts it's to protect a transfer value, a marketing deal, a place in the table. Sunderland sacked Adam Johnson only after he pleaded guilty, not when he was first arrested. Real Madrid kept selecting Asencio for over a year of active investigation before his form, not the case, pushed him out of the team. Waiting for a court is legally correct. It isn't the same as a club having asked its own questions early.
That leaves fans in an uncomfortable spot, and there isn't a clean formula for it. Taking an allegation seriously doesn't require assuming guilt, and defending a player's presumption of innocence doesn't require dismissing the people accusing him.
The honest position is usually the least satisfying one: hold the club and the league to a higher standard of transparency than they currently meet, and hold your own judgment of the player until a court, not a comments section, has actually looked at the evidence.
What happens next
The Gran Canaria trial continues through 7 September. A verdict, when it comes, will need to answer two separate questions: whether the two women's forgiveness is accepted as ending the privacy case against Asencio specifically, and whether the evidence supports convicting his three co-defendants of the more serious charge.
Those are two different courts of judgment reaching two different conclusions on the same set of facts which is, in miniature, the entire argument of this piece.
Scrutiny without abandoning due process
None of this is an argument for looking away when a footballer is accused of something serious. The women in this case allege something real happened to them, and that deserves to be taken seriously regardless of who ends up convicted of what. But taking an allegation seriously and treating it as a settled fact are different acts, and football's fastest-moving audience, its fans, on social media, in real time routinely skips from one to the other before a single witness has testified.
Asencio may be found responsible for what he's accused of. He may not be. Both outcomes are still open as this is published, and reporting on the difference between "accused" and "guilty" isn't a technicality for a 16-year-old whose recorded image is at the centre of a criminal case, and for a footballer whose career now runs alongside the words "child sex abuse case" whatever a court eventually decides, it's the only distinction that actually matters.
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